The death of Christ on Holy Wednesday

by DIVVS·IVLIVS

Bercianos de Aliste is a small and remote Spanish village near the Portugese border. Due to its century-long isolation the town’s parish has retained a very ancient and unadorned tradition of the Semana Santa, the Spanish Holy Week leading up to Easter. At first sight they seem to be following the standard rituals of the Holy Week: During the night before Holy Thursday a monumento is built for the host. From Wednesday to Good Friday women mourn for the enshrined body and watch over their Lord and Savior. Then the host is shared during the Holy Thursday liturgy. The Good Friday rituals begin in the morning, when the priest symbolizes the deceased Christ by lying on the floor.

As part of the Good Friday tradition an effigy of the deceased Christ is taken out of its shrine, a wooden miniature temple, in which it lay during the whole year. The effigy is affixed to the Cross and carried outside. The crucifix is then erected on the town square (elevatio Crucis). The ritual ends with the effigy being removed from the Cross (depositio Crucis) and laid again into the temple shrine. Then the final funeral procession commences, while wafers and traditional flatbreads are handed out or sold to the people, especially during Santo Entierro and Soledad. The procession is eventually concluded by an entombment ritual in a calvario, a symbolic grave. The effigy is later moved back to the chapel, the hermita, where it will stay until the next year.

The Semana Santa of Bercianos sticks out because it is umembellished: There is no laden orchestration of the events, no baroque pasos, no contest of the costaleros etc., and this allows for a better and less distracted glance at the underlying tradition and its chronological sequence. And it seems that not only the Bercianos tradition, but the Christian Holy Week tradition in general, is off by three days—or rather by two days, if you don’t count inclusively—, which would mean that Christ dies on Holy Wednesday. Yes, Christ dies on Wednesday, and it is possible to substantiate it. You would respond that it is received tradition that the Crucified is presented on Good Friday. This is true, but it is also a fact that the effigy on the Cross is only a simulacrum, a substitute body—a crucifix. And in Christian tradition the real body of Christ is the host, the true Corpus Christi. It is striking that in the evening hours of Holy Wednesday the parishes begin to construct a monumento (from Latin monumentum) for Christ’s body, which is nothing but a grave or a shrine, a symbolic tomb for the symbol of the true body. It is also conspicuous that women often mourn and watch over the entombed body, which is a prominent feature in the ancient tradition in Bercianos de Aliste that culminates in a vigil before Good Friday. Furthermore, the women are often joined by armed men, especially during the night. In Christian imagination the guards and vigils serve as a reminder of the need to prevent the Jews and/or the Romans from stealing the deceased body of Christ, so his later Resurrection could not be negated. In a similar tradition the Tenebrae ritual with the strepitus commemorating the extinction of Christ’s life, symbolized by the extinction of candles and other light sources, is celebrated on Holy Wednesday. At first glance it seems illogical to entomb Christ’s body and perform these mournful vigils and death rituals before Good Friday, which is supposed to be the day when Christ died.

It is well-known that the Semana Santa always reaches its climax on Good Friday, and that most traditional Christians view the processions on Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday (Resurrectio) as merely an appendix. This would be a strange attitude, since the Resurrection—which Easter is all about—is said to occur on Sunday, not on Friday. So there seem to be two chronologies at work here, the one by the book ending on Sunday, and the underlying, but apparently traditional and more ancient chronology with Christ’s death on Wednesday, his subsequent enshrinement, and the climax on Good Friday. This alternate liturgical current obviously ignores the events in the Passion narrative of the Gospel, where Christ is commonly believed to die on the Cross.

However, it does follow the sources on Julius Caesar’s death, funeral and resurrection. One thing that remained the same in both accounts was the date of death: According to the synoptic gospels Jesus died on 15 Nisan, while Caesar was assassinated on Wednesday, 15 March 44 BCE, after his last supper on the 14th in the house of magister equitum Lepidus, where he had foreshadowed his assassination and spoken of his quick death. It was well-known in Antiquity that Caesar’s passion was accompanied by the sun’s darkness from the sixth hour (Serv. Georg.1.466.1), and that the light of his life was “extinguished” (Verg. Georg.1.466)—Caesar’s tenebrae. Late on the Ides of March his followers began to build his shrine and plan the funeral, most notably Fulvia, Mark Antony and Calpurnius Piso (see below), while the women prepared his body and mourned for the deceased lord and savior. Armed men protected the body to prevent the conspirators and their followers from stealing the body, so they couldn’t declare Caesar a tyrant, drag him through the streets and throw him into the Tiber. Thereby the Caesarians ensured his state funeral that would eventually see his resurrection as god. Vigils and guards proceeded until the day of his cremation, and then continued until his entombment. Caesar’s funeral ceremony and his resurrection occured on the third day, on Friday, 17 March, the ancient Roman Liberalia festival. On this day small loaves of flatbread called liba were handed out to the people. Caesar’s corpse was laid on a deathbed and presented in the procession and on the Forum Romanum inside a shrine, which was a miniature model of the temple of his divine mother Venus Genetrix. On the Forum Mark Antony held his famous funeral oration, and during the climax a wax effigy of Caesar’s slaughtered body was affixed to a cruciform tropaeum and shown to the attending masses.

Within the framework of Francesco Carotta’s theory that the historical Jesus was Julius Caesar and that the Gospel is a diegetic transposition of the Roman sources on Caesar’s Civil War, both chronologies of the Holy Week make perfect sense. The original underlying chronology is based directly on the Caesarian tradition: death on Wednesday, funeral with presentation of the effigy/crucifix on Friday. The received chronology is however the result of the diegetic transposition in scripture and the effect it had on later Christian tradition: In the Gospel the betrayal of Caesar, the assault and his assassination had become the betrayal of Christ, the assault and his arrest. The death of the Son of God (which historically occured on Wednesday) had shifted to the funeral ceremony on Friday, because in scripture the assassination was now an arrest, while Caesar’s cremation on Friday was misinterpreted as the death of Christ (Crucifixion account; cf. i.a. CREMO > kremáô). In Christian tradition the crucifix (i.e. originally Caesar’s effigy on the tropaeum) was then gradually understood to be a representation of a real person’s crucifixion. Likewise the Resurrection shifted by three days from the funeral on Good Friday to Easter, which historically corresponds to the collecting of Caesar’s remains and their interment on Sunday, a ritual that is still observed in Bercianos de Aliste and elsewhere. It is the story of Caesar’s empty tomb: The women came to the place of his cremation, but Caesar’s body had vanished. His remains had already been collected and interred in the Julian family grave, but his empty tomb on the Forum remained a popular and public place of the resurrected god, adorned at first by a large rock monument that was later removed.

The faint but noticeable echo of the alternate Holy Week chronology with Christ’s death on Wednesday might seem odd and wrong to modern Christians, but that is beyond doubt what actually happens in the ritual tradition: the entombment of the true Corpus Christi. In any case, it would not have raised any eyebrows in Antiquity, because it constitutes the primary and unaltered tradition that originated directly from Julius Caesar’s funus. From a standpoint that focuses on the Gospel alone, this alternate tradition is however completely inexplicable.

But it is also possible to converge on the historical Holy Week from a different angle: From early Christian writers like Tertullian we know that before the introduction of the computus Easter used to be celebrated at a fixed time in March (de jejun. 14): pascha celebramus annuo circulo in mense primo. And it’s the Christian Saints and their feast days that tell us the exact dates and chronology of events:

Saint Joseph of Arimathea (17 March): the mortician of Christ (Piso, one of the supervisors of Caesar’s funeral)

Saint Joseph (19 March): “foster father” of Christ (also Caesar’s father-in-law Piso, as supervisor active at the last day of the funus: interment and Resurrection). [Nota bene: This second Joseph is also a partial transposition of Gaius Octavius, the putative father of the bodily resurrected Caesar, i.e. the young Caesar Octavian, whose real father was the god Apollo (by divine procreation), and later the divine Caesar Divus Iulius (by adoption and rebirth as Divi filius, “Son of God”). But the young Caesar was not at Rome during the great Caesar’s funeral, and this is therefore a later addition to the tradition. Originally this Joseph was only a doublet of Saint Joseph of Arimathea.]

To recapitulate: In the Julian calendar calculations for 44 BCE, the year of Caesar’s death, resurrection and interment, these three dates fell on a Wednesday, Friday and Sunday in the Babylonian week—which constitutes the historical Passion and Holy Week. Therefore it is not surprising and only logical that the author of one of the earliest Easter calendars, the Chronicon Paschale, did not connect the first computed Easter date in the system’s base-year (312/13 CE) to any hypothetically dated Biblical event, but placed the origin of his paschal cycle on the date of Julius Caesar’s proclamation as dictator in Antioch. (Yet another mystery easily solved within the Caesarian framework.)

5 Comments to “The death of Christ on Holy Wednesday”

wow! amazing, especially the darknes at the 6th hour. Do you know the reason for this darkness? (it doesn´t say at google books)

[ed.2: There is now a new article on this phenomenon. | ed. The darkness from the 6th hour until the night was due to the ash cloud from an enormous eruption of the Mount Aetna volcano. It was originally reported by Livy, whose works are however partially lost. But Servius (again) quotes from his account in his Georg. 1.472:

It is a bad portent when Mount Aetna of Sicily emits not puffs of smoke but balls of flame; and as Livy reports, such a quantity of flame poured forth from Mount Aetna before Caesar’s death that not only the neighboring cities but even the community of Regium, which is some considerable distance away, felt the blast of the heat.

From the parallel passage in Virgil we know that there were several eruptions, continuing after Caesar’s death, and accordingly we have many historians writing about the relative darkness of the sun from that time on for a few months. We also have the earthquake, and Tibullus even speaks of showering stones etc., which are mirrored in the Gospel of Matthew by the “renting stones”. The darkness was “all across the land”, which we find in the Gospel of Mark and the other synoptics. So the parallels to the phenomena at the time of Jesus’ death are all pretty obvious. (Maybe I’ll do a separate article on the darkness and the portents etc. at a later date.) It should however be noted that there is an alternative reading of the Servius passage, where it says “May” instead of “March”. On the one hand it would fit with the many reports that the eruptions and the defectus solis (“weakness of the sun”) continued after Caesar’s death, but we know that (a) the first eruption (apparently a huge one) was before Caesar’s murder, which would likely account for a sudden darkness early in March rather than later in May, where the sun was only generally weakened, and that (b) both Servius and (in the parallel passage) Virgil clearly speak of Caesar’s murder, so it’s quite illogical that Servius would talk about the month of May when the passage he is commenting on is about March. So it’s very likely that the alternative reading with “May” instead of “March” is a copying mistake. Some copyist apparently forgot the letters rt during the process: Martiarum > Maiarum. —DIV·IVL]

[…] mystery, the darkness beginning at the sixth hour, Caesar’s tenebrae, which we only mentioned briefly before. This darkness is reported by the Roman Virgil commentator Servius (Georg. 1.466.1), as he recounts […]

[…] Incidentally the liba flatbreads are still part of today’s Caesar cult at the Forum Romanum or Caesar’s statues—not seldomly as a modern Liberalia dish, namely plain pizza crust combined with honey (see image below). They are prominently used on the Ides of March because Caesar’s resurrection on the third day is almost forgotten. At any rate, it is conspicuous that even today the Easter liba are still also prominent during those historical days of March, from the 15th to the 19th, and are intrinsically tied to the Christian festivals of Saints Joseph, Patrick and Joseph of Arimathea, who are all transposed characters from the Caesarian sources. [Nota bene: On the Josephs as transpositions of Calpurnius Piso, cf. the penultimate paragraph in this article.] […]

i posted the following reply to your other article dealing with the apparent discrepancy between john and the other gospels, regarding the day/date of christ’s alleged crucifixion:

“personally, i find no discrepancy in the dates given in the four gospels, regarding the day/date of the crucifixion. once one realizes the entire bible is written from the perspective that every new day/date begins at the break of dawn; and that the “preparation of the passover” is the passover celebration; and that jesus said repeatedly, he would be 1) betrayed, 2) crucified, and 3) rise the third day, then it is easy to see the betrayal occurred on the 13th (thursday), followed by the crucifixion on the 14th (friday/passover), and the resurrection on the 15th (saturday/both the weekly and high sabbath). moreover, the last supper cannot be the passover, seeing as jesus broke leavened bread and left the house before dawn.”

but perhaps even more relative to this particular article, is the fact that both jesus and caesar are “lifted up” on the same day, i.e; friday.

i would also like to share the following:

KJV Acts 5:30 The God of our fathers raised up Jesus, whom ye slew and hanged on a tree.

KJV Acts 10:39 And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem; whom they slew and hanged on a tree:

the greek words for “slew” can mean ‘handled violently’ and/or ‘killed’. so these passages can refer to either situation, i.e; jesus being handled violently, then hung, and caesar being killed, then hung.

Over the course of my studies, I have concluded 1) the “biblical” day begins b’boker (hebrew)… in the morning; which could be defined as the dark hours just before, and as the dawn is breaking forth; as opposed to the orthodox jewish view that a day begins in the evening, and 2) the resurrection occurred on the sabbath (saturday), not sunday, followed by the early sunday morning tomb scene. With this in mind, please consider the following:

What if the “3 days and 3 nights”, commonly believed to refer to the time jesus spent in the tomb, referred, rather, to the time he spent in jerusalem during his alleged passion? For Jesus said, repeatedly, he would go to jerusalem, where he would be 1) betrayed, 2) crucified, and 3) raised the 3rd day. A problem, however, occurs when one tries to harmonize the gospel texts which say “the 3rd day” and “after 3 days”. The problem stems from a common misunderstanding of the greek term ‘meta’, which is correctly translated as “after”, as in “after three days”, but which causes many to think in terms of a 4th day… i.e; as occurring “after” 3 days/nights. But, in fact, ‘meta’ refers to a “sequence”, which in this particular case refers to a series of events over a 3 day period. So, with this understanding in mind, the betrayal would have occurred on thursday, the arrest thursday night, the trial and crucifixion friday, the burial friday night, and the resurrection occurring sometime saturday night; thus giving us 3 days and 3 nights.

Consequently, the age old tradition is only off by one day compared to the actual events presented in the gospels (as opposed to being compared to the common belief in a sunday resurrection).

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